I had a great week last week that left me feeling incredibly optimistic about the Seattle economy.

First, Techstars Seattle Demo Day. What a super event, “lots of coverage of it”:http://www.geekwire.com/2011/favorite-pitches-techstars-demo-day-red. Great young companies, enthusiasm, great pitches, good progress in fundraising. Big audience with great energy. Super job by @andysack and everyone involved, a model for everyone else in the Seattle community who wants to nurture startups. We need more of these events, not just in cloud/web. I’ve seen a lot of entrepreneurship events at UW and they are constrained by mentoring, hiring, seed financing – exactly what the techstars guys are providing. One of the companies, “Romotive”:http://romotive.com/, has also done a great job leveraging Kickstarter and have generated a lot of early revenue – the rise of crowd-sourced pre-sales/funding is a fascinating and positive evolution.

Everyone was hiring at the event. As an indicator of how desperate people are to hire, I had two guys try to hire me. If you think I am the answer to your problem, you are pretty desperate.

Then I spent the better part of a day in a meeting with the “UW College of Engineering Visiting Committee”:http://www.engr.washington.edu/mycoe/committees/visit.html. Some great data on the College of Engineering – most programs are massively oversubscribed, turning away students in bunches, doing a great job placing students. Great evolution in programs, great facilities, great staffing. The College could probably push out many more engineers and is constrained by state economic policies; with tweaks to tuition and governance, it seems like the pipeline could open much more broadly. And we also had a chance to listen to President Young speak who seems to have a very open attitude about IP licensing, he seems to recognize that getting IP out of the university and to work is important.

I left the two days feeling like a lot of piece parts are coming together fast. Seed funding. Crowd sourcing. Mentoring. Training/Education. And with iteration and tweaking, we could see an explosion of economic growth in the Seattle area. Exciting times.

* “Hitler’s Empire”:amazon by Mark Mazower. Very thorough history of how the Nazis ran Germany and the conquered territories during WWII. I expected the genocidal lunacy, but the amount of corruption, infighting, and mismanagement was new to me. Denser than I really wanted but thorough. Amazon gives 4.5 stars and it is a good book but probably more info than most want. * “Steve Jobs”:amazon by Walter Isaacson. Good coverage of his life. Not deep but entertaining. Humanizes him. Would have loved to have greater depth on some of the older material but still enjoyed. Amazon says 4 stars, that seems fine. * “The Candlemass Road”:amazon by George MacDonald Fraser. Period piece set on the Anglo-Scottish border. Written in a strong period voice, fun. Amazon says 4.5 stars, I might hold at 3.5 or 4, but a good read.

Not surprising given their losses over the weekend. I reran my “Monte Carlo analysis”:http://theludwigs.com/2011/11/a-monte-carlo-simulation-of-the-big10-race/ from last week and Michigan gets to the title game only 5 out of 10,000 runs now. Nebraska has only about a 6% chance. MSU is in clear control.

Nothing really changed in the Leaders Division. PSU didn’t play, Wisconsin and Ohio State beat teams they were expected to beat. PSU still has the inside track. Wisconsin and OSU still have excellent chances to get to the title game.

One could ask why I am dorking around with this? Well, the current computer rankings for NCAA football teams are largely theoretical garbage and lack transparency. I am curious if a more open, theoretically more sound ranking system could be developed. Modeling a full season of outcomes is one part of such a system. The other part has to be the feed-in probabilities for each of the games, which I haven’t attacked, but have some ideas about.

* “PlugBug”:http://twelvesouth.com/products/plugbug/. Ordered two. * “iZON”:http://steminnovation.com/section/iZON/24/. Sleek look, nice looking software, but some bugginess. When it all gets ironed out will be a fabulous product. * “Orchestra”:orchestra.com. Nice todo list with voice input (might be rendered irrelevant by Siri but I’m not 4s yet). Thanks “chris”:http://twitter.com/#!/chrisfhoward * “Batch”:batch.com. An Ignition investment. Nice photo sharing tool. * “Exoplanet”:http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/exoplanet/id327702034?mt=8. If you don’t love this, you have to turn in your nerd merit badge. * “Drawtop”:http://thedrawtop.com/shop. Haven’t ordered yet but the simplicity of converting an unused flat surface into a whiteboard is so appealing. * “Stepping into photos”:http://www.petapixel.com/2011/09/12/stepping-into-historical-photos-with-3d-camera-mapping/. No software to buy here, but I would buy in a second if there was something reasonably priced that would let me do this. * “Lost Crates”:https://lostcrates.com/. Love the idea. Not sure it would work well in practice. * “Voxatron”:humblebundle.com. What a nice looking indie game. Doesn’t quite suck me in the way Minecraft or Darwinia did, but excellent. * “Findings”:https://findings.com/jhludwig. Thanks @crashdev, this should be just part of the Kindle experience.

Wondering how recipes associated with classic outdoor occupations stack up? I know I was.

* “Ranger cookies”:http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Ranger-Cookies-106064. Not quite how I remember them as a kid but they have kind of a pecan pie nature to them which is good. * “Cowboy cookies”:http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/food-network-challenge/cowboy-cookie-recipe/index.html. Chocolate chips might push this one past the ranger cookie. * “Shepherd’s Pie”:http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Shepherds-Pie-240224. Tasty but I object to the name “pie”, it is just not pie.

Overall I am finding I like the Ranger cookie the best, and maybe they should have chocolate chips added.

November is shaping up to be quite the race in the Big10, I have to say, the addition of divisions and a championship game have created a great new dynamic (and makes me rethink my objection to a playoff, hmmm.)

Many sites have written about all the permutations of possible teams in the championship game, and the surprising fact that OSU is not out of it, and in fact has a very good shot at making the game. Being a bit of a nerd, I decided to play around with a “Monte Carlo simulation”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_method of the race to the championship game.

I wrote a little C program that does any arbitrary number of iterations of the rest of the season and examines the results to determine the championship game participants. The outcome of each game is determined randomly – a random number is selected from 0-1 and used as an index against the a priori probability (as made up by me) that each team would win the game. I.E., if you believe Northwestern has a 70% chance of beating Minnesota, then any random number from 0 to .7 implies a Northwestern win. I used the c rand function with a time-based seeding on each run, please no complaints about the quality of my random numbers, I am just simulating football games for gosh sakes. I toyed around with the a priori probabilities a little to see how sensitive the outcomes were. And then at the end of the season, I apply all the tiebreakers if necessary to see what teams represent the divisions in the title game. I ran the simulation 1000 times, and a few runs of 10,000 trials just for yuks. The 1000 run simulation

So – the Legends division. Not surprisingly, due to the weakness of their remaining schedule, MSU is the title game rep ~2/3rds of the time. Nebraska about ~1/3, and Michigan picks up a smattering (1%) of appearances. Since Michigan has already lost to MSU, if they ever end up tied in the standings, MSU always takes the spot. Michigan needs MSU and Nebraska to both falter (and can control the Nebraska since they have yet to play) and also needs to beat OSU, Illinois, Iowa. A tough road. This weekend’s play won’t shake things up much, the most interesting game is the Michigan-Iowa game, I would have picked Iowa a week ago but losing to Minnesota has shaken my faith in the F(erentz) Troop. The Nov 12th weekend will be more entertaining – MSU@Iowa, Michigan@Illinois, Nebraska@PSU. And then Nebraska@Michigan Nov 19th. It seems unlikely that Michigan will still be in the hunt by the time of the Ohio State game.

The Leaders division is far more interesting. PSU has the inside track, no surprise being up 2 games on everyone else at this point. They take the title game spot 30-60% of the time, depending on how you view the likelihood of them winning their remaining games. If you think they are a slight favorite in all their remaining games, then 60%. If you think they are a modest underdog, then 30%. OSU has a surprisingly good shot, 20-25%, depending on how you rate their odds against Michigan and PSU, and because they are in a good tiebreaker position having beaten Wisconsin. Wisconsin picks up the pieces and has the weakest chance due to the OSU loss. The Nov 5th weekend will likely teach us nothing as PSU has a bye, OSU has Indiana, Wisconsin has Purdue. The Nov 12th Nebraska@PSU game is one to watch, and then Nov 19th with Wisconsin@Illinois and PSU@OSU is a defining weekend. There is a very real chance that on the final weekend, all 3 teams need a win to make it to the game – OSU is at Michigan and PSU is at Wisconsin, so that should be a great day.

So someone asked me “Hey, with your views on the Occupy movement, how do you feel about the fact that the top 10% pays 70% of federal income tax? Is that fair?”

First of all, this is NOT the Occupy issue that gets me most excited – I am much more interested in limiting corporate political contributions. But I do have a view.

I have no idea if these statistics are accurate, but I assume that the top 10% does pay a much larger share of the total income tax load. So is that fair? Well, I am guessing that the top 10% also own a huge % of the Audis and BMWs in the country, eat a disproportionate share at the finest restaurants, take a huge % of the vacation trips to Hawaii, have a disproportionate share of the nicest houses, etc etc. Gosh that doesn’t seem fair either.

The goal of our market system and society is not fairness in outcomes; there is always going to be variance in outcomes, sometimes due to skill, sometimes due to luck. Some people will earn a lot more, and will get a greater share of the positive benefits as well as costs. Rather, the goal is equality of opportunity – every citizen should have the opportunity to achieve their dreams, no doors should be closed at the start of their life/career.

Thus I don’t get cranked about higher tax burdens or higher tax rates for the wealthy. So someone who is extraordinarily successful has to carry a higher share of the cost of operating our society, well boo hoo. I do get more cranked about issues that affect equality of opportunity – lack of funding for public schools, lack of equal healthcare for all children, lack of access to other education for lower income students (and this is why we give a lot to scholarship programs at OSU, at UW, at the Point Foundation, etc).

Outcomes will never be equal and we shouldn’t try to level them out, the free market system is powerful and we need to nurture it. But we should try to ensure that everyone has an equal opportunity to pursue happiness – and to me that means everyone gets a fair starting point: a reasonable education, good health, and no crushing debt load to start out.

So “Nest”:www.nest.com is the newest shiny toy for the tech industry and media to get all excited about, a ton of coverage this week – for a thermostat. Obviously some of the ardor will fade – how long can anyone stay excited about a thermostat? But I do think there is a theme here which has some enduring value.

I’m not really that excited about the UI and learning features of the Nest thermostat. I am able to navigate my smart thermostat today, and I just don’t need to futz with it very often. In our new house it took me a couple days to get things where I wanted them but I’ve moved on and haven’t had to look back. But I am totally excited about the remote access for the Nest thermostat, the web interface. Our houses are the biggest asset we own, and the cloud presence of our house is either missing or spewed all around the web in random places. There are so many things I should be able to do:

* Remote utility management. Remote thermostat is a nice start. I want remote utility management in general – what’s the temp right now, what’s my water usage, change my temp, change my water heater temp, turn on/off my sprinklers, check my power usage, turn on/off appliances/circuits, check my usage and billing history, etc. I can get pieces of this but it is hard hard hard to get it all and to integrate it all into a single cloud interface. * Remote security. Webcam monitoring, alarm monitoring, history of access to house, “remote door lock management”:http://theludwigs.com/2011/10/anyone-have-experience-with-wireless-deadbolts-from-schlage-kwikset-yale/. Again you can get piece parts of this but cobbling together is a significant pain. * Remote doorbell. When someone rings my doorbell, I want an instant notification on my smartphone, I want to see the video feed from my door, and I want to be able to talk thru the intercom. The person at the door should have no idea if I’m in my kitchen or on a business trip. This is part of the security topic but is more compelling than most of the security features. * Bills. Utility bills, consumption history, how I compare to others, bill payment. * Financial info. Mortgage status – balance, rate, is it time to refi. The estimated sale value of my house. Mortgage document storage. Tracking of improvements to the house – costs, documentation – so I can correctly calculate cost basis at sale time. * Service. All the warranty terms and docs for all the appliances and other features of my house. A place to track service records, to record preferred vendors, to get vendor recommendations. A service advisor – what maintenance should I expect to do in the next year based on what is known about my house – time for roof inspection, approaching lifetime of water heaters, time to repaint, what is my likely cost in the next year for all this.

You can get a ton of this info today but it is spewed all over the web. To access all the info about your house, you would have to access the Nest site, any smart metering site, a remote security site (or several for webcam, door locks, monitoring service), each of the utility websites, your bill payment web site, your mortgage provider website, zillow, redfin, etc.

I’d love to have a portal that integrates all this via user configurable widgets into a single interface – my home at a glance. And gives me great mobile access to all the info and features. And just gets better as I add nicely designed devices into the house – a Nest thermostat, a great doorbell/webcam, internet-controllable door locks, etc.

I’m sure the Nest guys are thinking broadly about the entire space, with a general name like Nest they must have ambitions beyond thermostats. I’m excited to watch their evolution. I’d love to have better command of the largest asset I own.

I’m not the only one – “Apple forum discussion on bounce”:https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3201744?start=0&tstart=0.

OK I realize it wasn’t actually that effective in stopping unwanted email, but I enjoyed using it as a kind of “f%^* you” message to certain senders. I got an emotional lift from hitting that button.

Despite losing two games to MSU and Nebraska, OSU can control its own destiny in the Big10 race. If OSU wins out, they will have 2 losses in the Leaders division.

* Wisconsin will have at least two losses – MSU and OSU – and thus would lose a tiebreaker to OSU * Purdue would have at least two losses, including one to OSU, and thus would lose the tiebreaker. OK, seriously tho, Purdue will have many more losses. * Illinois would have at least two losses, and would lose the head-to-head tiebreaker with OSU. * The only stretch is Penn State. They’d have one loss to OSU, and then you have to accept they will lose at least one more, and they stil have Illinois, Nebraska, and Wisconsin on the schedule. Fairly reasonable to expect them to drop another.

OK, so this edition of the Buckeyes may not have it in them to get it done this season, but even having a chance is surprising.

“Daring Fireball”:http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/10/21/qr-codes points to a “pretty thorough takedown of QR codes”:http://www.imediaconnection.com/article_full.aspx?id=30267 as used in print ads. The original design goal – Toyota invented these to track parts – makes sense, but jamming these into consumer media is just strange.

* Users can already type in your URL or a sentence, or speak into Siri, or do an image search with their phone. Is taking a snap of this code thing really so much better? * There’s a history of companies trying to stuff proprietary ID systems in between users and product/service providers. These visual codes are one such thing. AOL Keywords, RealNames are text-based equivalents. They all try to get advertisers to stuff these in ads, but I don’t see how this really serves users or advertisers, it mostly just serves the companies with the proprietary ID system. * Ultimately, if your product/ad/message is so forgettable that you think jamming a QR code or text string in will help, well, there is a deeper problem.

Available February/March next year. The “Lytro”:http://www.Lytro.com features a technology they call “light field” – they grab sufficient photon data at capture time to allow refocusing, zooming, etc as a post-capture option. The Lytro is a simple step on the way to a full software-defined lens – I first wondered about such a lens in 2003, should have filed a bunch of patents. Other people are pushing the idea ahead, see for instance “Software Defined Lensing”:http://www.creative-technology.net/CTECH/SDL.html.

As the writeup points out, you can view a traditional glass lens as a kind of quantum computer with a single fixed purpose, established at manufacture time. The lens captures all the incident photons, does some photonic/quantum computation, and spits an answer out on the CCD. But if we can replace the lens with something that has much more dynamic, programmable behaviour, well very cool things could be done – arbitrary refocusing and zooming being just the simplest example. A much broader set of incident radiation could be captured, spectral analysis of the image could be performed, filtering of the image, incredible levels of zoom, etc.

The Lytro is a very modest step in this direction but exciting.

So “I don’t really get iCloud storage yet”:http://theludwigs.com/2011/10/im-struggling-to-understand-why-i-would-ever-use-icloud-storage/, and “Photostream doesn’t really accomodate all my DSLR pictures well”:http://theludwigs.com/2011/10/icloud-photostream-and-dslrs-dont-seem-to-be-a-great-fit/. So rather than just whine about what I don’t have, what do I really want?

First – I have a 203G (gigabyte) Aperture library today, that is where my primary photo storage is. Digging into this a little:

* 54G is thumbnails, previews, cache of various sorts. 27G of thumbnails alone! Impressive use of disk space, Aperture. Clearly the team has embraced the idea that disk space is cheap and is getting cheaper. There are probably some settings I could tweak to trim the size of all this at the cost of performance, but whatever, disk space IS cheap, 30% overhead is probably not a ridiculous design objective. This is all derived data tho and could be trimmed, dropped, whatever, as I think about cloud storage. * My masters are 149G. A mix of RAW and JPG depending on which camera/scanner I used and how long ago I took – tending towards more RAW over time. ** 19G from this year ** 34G from 2010 ** 25G from 2009 ** 71G from earlier years.

Lets assume I continue to take pictures at the last 3 year average rate for some time, that is about 25gig of new photos every year, not accounting for inflation in photo size due to better quality capture chips, “light field cameras”:http://www.lytro.com/cameras, etc. OK so you probably have to assume some growth in that 25gig of new storage a year.

Cloud storage of photos – is it important? Hugely so, if my house is burning down, I do not want to be running back in to save a hard disk, photos are emotionally very important. And I do NOT want to have to pick and choose which photos I store in the cloud – too many photos, not enough time, I just want the entire set up in the cloud. I really just want my entire Aperture (and iPhoto) collection replicated to the cloud automagically. And then I need some modest access control features on the folders in the cloud so that I can share selected photo sets with family members, etc.

So I want a cloud storage solution that gives me ~200gig of storage today at a reasonable price, and if I think about the next couple years, a clear path to 300-400gig. And with good web access with some security. What are my choices today?

* iCloud doesn’t begin to work. Aperture doesn’t really talk to it except for Photostream. The max storage I can buy is 55gig. There are no access controls. Doesn’t work along almost every dimension. * Dropbox. I can get 100G for $240 a year with a nice web interface and some sharing controls. I could even get the team license, store up to 350G, but for $795 a year. If I had this, I could just move my Aperture library into my dropbox folder and voila, it would be in the cloud, on my other machines, etc. However – the Aperture library folder is not really meant to be browsed by humans, the masters are chopped up into some funky balanced tree of directories. Seems like Aperture needs to learn how to work with shared storage. But I could get everything in dropbox, with a very easy UI for me, but at a high price, and probably the ability to share folders with family members would be hard to realize. * Box.net. Well I get 50G free with their iPad offer, so they pretty much trump iCloud. I could get up to 500G in a business plan for $180/year per user. Similar pros and cons as with Dropbox, but pricing seems better. * “Smugmug”:http://www.smugmug.com. This is what I use today. There is an Aperture plugin, I can save from Aperture. The bad part about this is that it is not automagic – I have to intentionally move folders up there, not happy about that. But – unlimited storage, at $40-150 per year for jpg, some extra cost but still cheap if you want RAW. A great interface for sharing, completely customizable, printing integration, etc.

For now …. Smugmug is the way to go, but as storage costs drop, I can see flipping to box.net or dropbox at some point. I’d give up some of smugmug’s great interface for admin control but that is overkill for me anyway. If Apple made this all work natively in Aperture at a competitive cost, that would be fine too. For people with a more modest set of photos, the Box.net 50G free offer for iPad/iPhone users seems like an awesome option.

Settings…general…keyboard…shortcuts. Love these, will save me infinite amount of typing. Completing web forms, email, everywhere.

But why oh why aren’t these iCloud enabled? I want the same exact shortcuts on my iPad, iPhone, and Mac. And I don’t want to have to re-enter them on each device. The lack of multiple device support is exactly why I’ve given up on so many other text expanders over time, if I can’t depend on text expansion working the same way on all my devices, then it just isn’t that useful.

Here’s hoping that that Apple fixes this in a future release.

“Out of Orbit” and “Unlikely Allies” are the stars of the group.

* “Bottled lightning: Superbatteries, Electric Cars, and the New Lithium Economy”:amazon by Seth Fletcher. Decent nontechnical book about the lithium battery and lithium production. Entertaining intro to the topic. Amazon gives it 4 stars, I’d say 3.5, would have liked a little more technical depth. * “Where’s My Jetpack”:amazon by Daniel H. Wilson. Short essays on the Jetpack, moving sidewalks, and other promised tech from sci fi. Kind of bland. Amazon says 4 stars but I’d say 2. Maybe if I didn’t already read a lot of scientific literature and science fiction, I’d like this. But I suspect all the readers of this book have a science/science fiction bent. * “Out of Orbit”:amazon by Chris Jones. Terrific true story about shuttle/international space station astronauts. Really digs into the emotional side of their trips, the highs of space travel, the lows of dealing with isolation and with the loss of colleagues in the shuttle disasters. Very compelling. Amazon says 4 stars, at least that. * “Unlikely Allies”:amazon by Joel Richard Paul. The story of an American and two Frenchmen during the Revolutionary War, and their involvement in securing the support of France – both diplomatic and material support. Fascinating look at a facet of the war that I knew little about. Amazon says 4.5 stars, I’m good with that. * “Introduction to Spintronics”:amazon by Supriyo Bandyopadhyay, Marc Cahay. This book is a good introduction if you already have a solid technical foundation in quantum mechanics at the graduate level – be prepared for a lot of math. If you want a nontechnical intro to spintronics, look elsewhere. Amazon says 5 stars but that is based on a single review. It is a very solid book though.